Mary King (political scientist)

Sara Evans attributes King and Hayden as founding activists for the women's liberation movement in her book "Personal Politics."

Evans claims that King and Hayden used their knowledge of participatory democracy, learned through SNCC membership, to critique women's position in a system of patriarchy.

[6] Between 1968 and 1972 King worked for the federal government during the Johnson and Nixon administrations under the U.S. office of economic opportunity helping to set up neighborhood health services for America's rural and urban poor.

This group of students also visited white schools, such as Vanderbilt University, Agnes Scott College, and Georgia Tech.

[12] King graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in June 1962 and following in the same path as Casey Hayden[13] was introduced to civil rights activist, Ella Baker, through the Young Women's Christian Association in the southern region.

This project would involve King travelling with a recent black graduate to different colleges to assess the extent of academic freedom in the south.

For this job King moved to Atlanta, Georgia and was partnered with a young black woman, Roberta Yanci "Bobbi."

The goal of the human-relations project was to help southern whites meet and know educated black counterparts from the same area, so that they could develop relationships with them as human beings.

King fled to a Roman Catholic convent in North Carolina and eventually returned to SNCC headquarters in Atlanta only to be sent to Mississippi.

This paper addressed what it meant to be a woman SNCC staff member and the unequal treatment that resulted because of the patriarchal system.

"[20] In 1965 King and Hayden expanded on this paper, elaborating on its central thesis that not only in society at large, but also within the civil rights movement itself, women are "caught" in a "common-law caste system" that limits their opportunity and voice.

[22] The document was subsequently published under the title "Sex and Caste"[23] in the pacificst periodical Liberation, and entreated women to "start to talk with each other more openly.

"[24] In the summer of 1965 King began planning and conducting workshops to help movement volunteers remain active in civil rights issues once they went home.

The workshops were "to discuss ways of using new skills, experiences, and lessons learned from community organizing in other parts of the country and in other phases of the movement."